Entangled

Several years ago I saw a macabre trophy at Bisley. Mounted on a shield were the heads of two roe bucks with their antlers entangled. A little ivory plaque explained that they had been found dead and emaciated. The guess was they had been in a fight. The antlers were not very heavy, but a complete sit of six points on each head.

Somehow this image stayed with me and resurfaced when I was exploring how to use an S curve as the basis for a picture. There was another idea as well, of a rugby player touching down while being tackled. I will paint that too in a while but the deer got first look in.

To make an explicit story I included a roe doe grazing while the bucks fought for her favours. She nibbles away, unconcerned, set against some brush while two trees with dark leaves arch over the combat.

The darkness of the leaves suggests distance and brighter greens are graded to suggest the meadow in which the bucks are fighting. I chose to make the bucks a darker red than they would appear in sunlight because I wanted to balance the tones of the greens.

I have never seen bucks wrestle like this but have heard the clash of antlers as they engage.

To express that the painting was a set of marks on the canvas I deliberately set a border od unpainted canvas along the edges which the paint would be allowed to cross in some places and which eat deep into the shapes in others.